Abstract

Several studies promote vocational education as an effective solution to the school-to-work transition issues, which have become endemic for the most advanced economies. However, individuals choosing this track may face a trade-off among a labour-market advantage at early stage of their individual careers and quicker skills depreciation in the long-run, due to
less adaptability and technological change, becoming less competitive than skills provided by academic-based education, in a lifelong learning perspective. Using microdata from the Survey of Household and Income (SHIW) allows to follow individuals over their life-cycle for at least 40 years, to investigate whether this view has empirical support in a borderline country-level labour market, stressing outcomes’ differences among school-based vocational education and a more traditional academic-based education at upper-secondary school level.
We find strong and robust support to this trade-off